Senate president takes more steps to block Heartbeat bill

Thursday

Nov 29, 2012 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2012 at 6:38 PM

Maneuvers continued today to ensure the Heartbeat Bill does not make it to the Senate floor for a vote over the wishes of Senate President Tom Niehaus. Niehaus, R-New Richmond, today removed two members of Senate GOP leadership, Sens. Keith Faber and Shannon Jones, from the Senate Rules and Reference Committee. The committee then voted this morning to pull the Heartbeat Bill out of the Senate Health Committee and move it to the Rules Committee, which Niehaus chairs.

Jim Siegel, The Columbus Dispatch

Tired of seeing his members bullied by certain factions of the “pro-life” community, Senate President Tom Niehaus today took new steps to ensure the Heartbeat Bill does not make it to the Senate floor over his opposition.

Niehaus, R-New Richmond, today removed two members of Senate GOP leadership, Sens. Keith Faber and Shannon Jones, from the Senate Rules and Reference Committee. The committee then voted this morning to pull the Heartbeat Bill out of the Senate Health Committee and move it to the Rules Committee, which Niehaus chairs.

The move effectively shuts off a procedural move that could have forced a vote on the bill.

Niehaus also said that Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid was a key reason he does not want to pass the bill, which would create the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country. Supporters expect the law would be challenged to the Supreme Court, in hopes of overturning Roe v. Wade. The hope was that Romney would appoint justices to support such a decision.

“The risk became, do you send a bill to the U.S. Supreme Court that has the potential to undermine all of the good work the right-to-life community has done?” Niehaus said. “I don’t know the answer. That appeared to me to be an extreme risk to take and I was not willing to take that risk.”

Faber, the No. 2 Senate leader who will be Senate president when the new legislative session begins in January, and Jones have been two of the biggest supporters of the anti-abortion bill and did not agree with Niehaus’ decision to not pass it in the remaining few weeks of this session.

The vote to move the bill to the Rules Committee was unanimous, but Niehaus said he was not sure of that last night when he decided to pull Jones and Faber off the panel. “At the time I made the decision, I didn’t know where the votes were.”

Faith2Action, the lead group pushing for the Heartbeat Bill, has called for GOP senators to sign a discharge petition – a rarely used procedure where, if a majority of a chamber’s members sign on, a bill can be forced out of committee and onto the chamber floor for a vote.

But moving the bill to the Rules Committee effectively blocks that attempt because a bill must be in a committee for at least 30 days before a discharge petition can be used. The Senate will adjourn for the year before 30 days pass.

“This bill saw some of the most intense lobbying efforts in recent memory. That’s fine,” Niehaus said. “But threatening, in my mind, goes over the line. We saw tactics that I did not appreciate and my members did not appreciate. For a small faction of the pro-life community to target the most pro-life group of senators in recent memory was, to me, outrageous.”

Niehaus said he has strong support within the caucus, and Faber said this week he would not go along with a discharge petition.

“This was an effort on my part to fulfill my responsibility as the leader of the caucus to protect my members and say this was my decision,” Niehaus said.

Asked if there were also threats made behind the scenes, Niehaus said, “I would prefer not to answer that.”

Niehaus said he was glad the Faith2Action and Ohio Right to Life worked out a compromise on the bill, but not all conditions were met for passage of the bill. In addition to Romney’s loss, he also noted that the most recent, extensive changes to the bill were dropped off to him on Tuesday. “ There is not time to go through the changes at this point.”

As it passed the House last year, the bill would have banned all abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, generally within the first eight weeks of a pregnancy.

But the most recent version of the bill – crafted as Faith2Action and Ohio Right to Life attempted to work out their differences on the original bill – would create a unique two-tier approach, where it would start as a total abortion ban, with a rape and incest exception, but if the federal courts struck that down, it would revert to a heartbeat ban.

“I’m not an attorney, but I’m told there are some legal problems with that process,” Niehaus said.

Niehaus said if bill supporters argue that he’s thwarting the democratic process, he said a discharge petition would have “bypassed the committee process completely. It would be a hollow argument for the people who were trying to bypass the legislative process to argue that what I did bypassed the legislative process.”